The Hidden Cost of Trump’s Trade War on China

When President Trump placed new tariffs on China this month, he doubled down on one of his top demands on Beijing: to rein in the chemical companies fueling the illicit production and trafficking of fentanyl into the United States. Mr. Trump has long argued that China is a huge contributor to overdoses that have killed more than 400,000 Americans over the last decade, and he’s right. For years, Chinese companies have supplied the vast majority of the lethal chemicals that drug cartels around the world use to produce the fentanyl flooding American streets.

But starting a trade war isn’t a solution to this problem — and could make it worse. Tariffs alone will not push China’s government to help reduce drug overdose deaths in the United States. In fact, with Beijing already imposing retaliatory tariffs and proclaiming that it’s “ready to fight till the end,” Trump’s blunt-force tactics might drive China to cooperate less on fentanyl, not more. With the stakes as high as they are, American communities cannot afford a miscalculation.

Starting in 2016, overdose deaths from synthetic opioids — primarily fentanyl — began skyrocketing across the United States. When Joe Biden took office in early 2021, the number of such deaths had increased 30 percent from the previous year, with tens of thousands of Americans killed. In February 2024, my family joined the hundreds of thousands of American families who have lost a loved one to this epidemic when a relative died from a fentanyl overdose. This personal tragedy happened just two weeks after I joined the State Department to help lead the Biden administration’s effort to address global fentanyl trafficking.

With heightened clarity about fentanyl’s devastating impact, I spent the past year helping lead the U.S. diplomatic offensive to curtail Chinese companies’ role as the global suppliers of the precursor chemicals that are used to make illegal fentanyl. We used every lever of American power — from law enforcement to sanctions to diplomacy — to pursue progress on curbing fentanyl precursors with China’s government. And while it wasn’t perfect, it was working.

In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order imposing sanctions on individuals and companies engaged in the illicit opioid trade. His Treasury Department put sanctions on more than 300 individuals and entities, freezing entire networks of fentanyl suppliers and traffickers out of the international financial system. In 2023 and 2024, Mr. Biden identified China as a major illicit drug-producing country for its role in the synthetic opioid trade, a blow to the reputation of China’s chemical industry.

Simultaneously, the Biden administration pushed U.S. law enforcement agencies to conduct aggressive investigations and build indictments against dozens of Chinese citizens and companies that were trafficking fentanyl precursor chemicals into the United States. The Department of Justice worked closely with foreign governments from Fiji to Morocco to arrest Chinese traffickers and extradite them to the United States for prosecution. The first convictions were handed down just last month.